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First Attempt to Image Jupiter

So, you probably saw the post I put up a day or two ago about having just gotten a Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope. I’ve been having a ball with it so far. My plan last night was to try using my digital camera to take some video of Jupiter and then run it through Registax software to see what came out of it. I followed the instructions posted on this page at Stargazer’s Lounge. I can’t claim to have done anything original here–just followed the cookbook.

My final image of Jupiter, created from video processed by Registax

So, last night I was mostly thwarted by cloud cover. I couldn’t see any stars to align the telescope with, but I did have a small window through the clouds to see Jupiter. I settled for manual pointing and tracking, and I used this bracket from Orion Telescopes to attach my little digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix) to my telescope. The bracket seemed to work okay for this application, and it wasn’t hard to get my camera centered over the 25 mm eyepiece I was using. A little focusing and I had a decent view of Jupiter through the camera’s display. Here’s the video I shot:

You can make out some cloud bands on Jupiter even in the video, but the processing done by Registax makes them appear much more pronounced. I have a lot of work ahead of me yet to figure out how best to make use of Registax and other image processing tools, but so far so good.